Tim Bonner

When it comes to social media, I’ve pretty much gone AWOL of late. I remember when I first set up my Facebook account, I spent hours looking at stuff, playing games and chatting with friends online. It felt so much a part of my life and so much more than any other social network. Then I graduated to Twitter, Google+, Linkedin, Instagram and Pinterest.

When you’re a stay at home dad, an inevitable question that comes up is “when are you going to return to work?” It’s a question I consider myself from time to time and one that I don’t fully have an answer for. Yet. The Opportunity I kept in contact with a couple of people when I left my previous employer.

Disclosure: Some of the links in this post are affiliate links, and at no additional cost to you, I will earn a commission if you decide to make a purchase. I’ve used various WordPress plugins to help with search engine optimisation (SEO) over the last couple of years. I’ve never been completely satisfied with every aspect of the features they had though.

Every Sunday I seem to wake up earlier than I’d like to – usually around 6 am. I find it a real struggle to get back to sleep but last weekend it was even worse. I woke up at 5 am. Lately I’ve been suffering from sore ribs. It’s my own fault that they’re sore. Ever since I decided I don’t want to be a lazy blogger, I’ve been out running four times a week.

We’ve lived on the grounds of a boarding school for almost four years now. It’s quite a strange existence at times and can be a real strain on family life. But when it provides a free roof over your head, that’s all that matters, right? Maybe, or so I thought. Free Isn’t Always Free We didn’t go into this with our eyes wide shut.

Disclosure: Some of the links in this post are affiliate links, and at no additional cost to you, I will earn a commission if you decide to make a purchase. I get bored with social media very easily. It doesn’t hold my interest like it used to but I know, as a blogger, it’s important to have a presence at the same time. It’s kind of expected.

It’s not always easy to get across what you want to say; particularly if you’re a five-year-old like my daughter. Effective communication is something I struggle with sometimes but considering I’m in my forties I have less of an excuse. She, on the other hand, has only just begun to find her voice but there are added complications. Firstly, she has glue ear and that causes some hearing loss.

I decided a while ago that I’d start writing more personal stories here sometimes. Something along the lines of what dad bloggers do or at least what I’d expect them to do. So over the last few weeks I’ve been checking out some other blogs and what they’re all about. I was pleasantly surprised by many of them but with others I was disappointed.

Disclosure: Some of the links in this post are affiliate links, and at no additional cost to you, I will earn a commission if you decide to make a purchase. Since I started this blog, I’ve used a number of different WordPress themes. All of them felt right at the time. But were they perfect for my blog? Probably not.

Perhaps I should start by asking the question, how important do you feel? I don’t think self worth is an easy thing to control and can result in certain extremes. As a stay at home dad, I’ve come to terms with not being the breadwinner. I suppose leaving work did affect how I felt about some things. For a while, I didn’t care too much about my appearance.

It’s been almost four years since I gave up work to become a stay at home dad. I’ve found the experience both rewarding and at times intensely frustrating. I remember the first few days after I finished work wondering whether I’d made the right decision. The suggestion from my employer was that I’d be bored, lonely, would be living off my wife and would end up regretting the decision.

Up until recently I had an ongoing saga with the Envato Marketplace. I’d paid for a plugin on Codecanyon using the Prepaid Credit option only to find the plugin didn’t live up to expectations. It caused error messages to appear on my site, as well as white screens and kept using up too many resources so my site went down with 500 internal server errors.

Do you ever get bored of reading the same old stuff? There’s not much left when it comes to blogging that hasn’t been covered so it’s inevitable that similarity and duplication is here to stay. It’s not always enough to write about something in your own words though. It needs to be more than that.

I bought a WordPress plugin from CodeCanyon last month to replace a free one I was using. I’ve always had a positive experience with anything I’ve bought from the Envato Marketplace. I wasn’t expecting anything different this time around. Unfortunately, I had issues with the plugin as soon as I installed it.

When you think of home, what springs to mind? Your house, the place you live, maybe the country you live in? I’ve lived in so many different houses, flats and apartments around the UK that home has become wherever I’m living at the time. But some things that have happened over the past couple of years have made me question what home means.

The thing about blogging is you spend a fair amount of time sitting on your ass. Or at least I do! Couple that with being at home 24-7 to look after the kids, the motivation to maintain any kind of fitness regime goes out of the window. Slowly but surely after I gave up work, almost four years ago now, I started to pile on the pounds.

Over time, I’ve changed how I feel about blog comments. Although I’ve never thought about removing them from my blog. I’ve become disillusioned by the formulaic ego-boosting structure people are being taught to follow. Sure there are things to avoid when you leave a comment but that’s just common sense and common courtesy.

Google Adsense. Love it or hate it, it can help you make money online from home however many people visit your site each day. It makes it easy to put ads on your website and you can set and forget them. But there are a few catches when it comes to making money with Google Adsense. You’re probably already aware of some of them. Ad Blockers I don’t blame people for using ad blockers.

Disclosure: Some of the links in this post are affiliate links, and at no additional cost to you, I will earn a commission if you decide to make a purchase. Before my final year at university, a group of us decided it would be a great idea to spend a month travelling around the Baltic States. It was 1994 and the countries were only just a couple of years out of their communist grip.

One thing I’ve always tried to be careful about is disclosure. If someone lands on my blog and buys something through an affiliate link, I’m grateful. But I also let them know that I’ve been compensated for it. Similarly, if I get paid to write a blog post, I make that clear so people know the relationship behind the words.